6 Things That Aren't Strategic Workforce Planning

Because we SWP nerds like 6s – 6 steps, 6 B’s – here are 6 Things That Aren’t Strategic Workforce Planning:

1.      A spreadsheet of workforce numbers and positions

Like all nerds, I love a spreadsheet. But no tool alone is a workforce plan.

A spreadsheet might give you the name, birthdate, start date and position of every single person in your organisation – but absolutely no understanding of whether those are the right people for your organisation’s future.

If you use that spreadsheet for recruitment planning – let me gently tell you that that’s not workforce planning either! Using a spreadsheet alone won’t help you confidently make choices between roles when the finances come down to the crunch. They won’t help you quantify the relative risks of unoccupied positions.

What’s more likely is that you’ll refill each vacancy like-for-like, without ever stopping to ask whether that role still makes sense — or whether it’s where you should be investing to move the organisation forward

With a Strategic Workforce Planning approach, you consciously create the adaptive, flexible workforce you need to keep your organisation in the best shape it’s ever been.

2.      A cost-cutting mechanism

Your staff budget is down by 10%, so you’ll reduce your headcount by 10%? It’s certainly a choice, but it’s not a Strategic Workforce Plan.

Strategic Workforce Planning is a whole systems approach to baking in elegance and efficiency at all stages of the work that you do and the people who do it. Using SWP as your approach to ‘rightsizing’ means that you’re far less likely to have to compromise on delivery, reputation, or your organisations longevity when short term cost pressures arise.

3.      A mathematical answer to exactly how many people you need

This isn’t a once-and-done calculation that will give you exactly how many people and where you need for the next 20 years of your organisational lifecycle.

How many people, where, and with what skills will change as your organisation changes – it will need to adapt as your environment changes. A number set in stone will not help you to keep adapting, growing and developing with new markets, challenges or political pressures.

Strategic Workforce Planning helps you approach an unknown future with confidence, and make decisions now that keep you ready for tomorrow.

4.      A skills taxonomy

Most CEOs and HRDs worry about having the right future skills in the workforce – and they’re not wrong! But going through the pain of creating an exhaustive skills taxonomy of what you have is a huge investment of time and effort – and without a plan of how to use it will yield no return on that investment.

Strategic Workforce Planning isn’t just another list – it’s razor-sharp analysis of which skills and capabilities that genuinely matter for your organisation to be successful in the future, and being clear about the steps you’ll take to secure them.

5.      A project

We’ve all heard that statistic that 70% of projects fail. Fortunately, that claim is… a little shaky, but there are plenty of concerning statistics about how many pitfalls projects can stumble into!

If you have a once-a-year project to create your workforce plan or projections, creating a project structure to stand it up and close it all off after writing a document, you’re not Strategic Workforce Planning.

True SWP is an organisational muscle – an ongoing, agile, enterprise capability that continually tests and iterates to make sure you stay fighting fit.

6.      A Magical Crystal Ball

Our environment changes rapidly, and there’s no magic prediction machine that can tell us exactly what to expect even this time next year.

Around this time of year 3 years ago, ChatGPT burst into everyday conversation. Did you see it coming? Likely not – and you wouldn’t have been planning for it at that point either.

A workforce plan that you set three years ago and never looked at again would not have predicted the decisions you might be faced with today about how to automate effectively without compromising your people, your delivery, or your reputation with your customer base.

An effective Strategic Workforce Planning process, though, would have flagged this in your environmental scanning and put it into your regular review cadence to make sure you knew what scenarios were on the horizon and how you could plan to respond to them.

It’s not about having a perfect, static answer from the Magic 8 Ball. It’s about coming out from behind it, looking beyond it, and being ready to pounce on every upcoming opportunity and dodge every incoming bullet, Matrix-style – and we’re here at Beyond The 8 Ball to help you!

More soon. Outlook: Clearer

Jen